HUMANITAS 89 Acedia, Tristitia and Sloth

Acedia, Tristitia and Sloth:

Early Christian Forerunners
to Chronic Ennui
Ian Irvine
This article focuses on the relevance of early Christian writings on
acedia and tristitia to the primary modern and postmodern mala-
dies of the subject, i.e., chronic ennui, alienation, estrangement, dis-
enchantment, angst, neurosis, etc. The focus will be on the chronic
ennui cycle which has been extensively discussed by Steiner
(1971), Bouchez (1973), Kuhn (1976), Healy (1984), Klapp (1986)
and Spacks (1995).
1
It can be described as a cycle of boredom and
addiction which robs individuals of meaning and a sense of the lan
vitale. This cycle has undergone various mutations of form over the
centuries. Many of the writers mentioned above have plotted its
course of development from classical times to the present. Such dis-
cussions begin with the descriptions of taedium vitae, luxuria and
the horror loci supplied by Roman philosophers and writers such as
Lucretius, Petronius and Seneca. They also encompass analyses of
the spiritual illnesses of acedia and tristitia written by the Desert Fa-
thers and of the various emotional and medical conditions de-
scribed by Medieval and Early Modern poets and medical profes-
1
George Steiner, In Bluebeards Castle (1971); Madeleine Bouchez, LEnnui
(1973); Reinhard Kuhn, The Demon of Noontide: Ennui in Western Literature (1976);
Sean Desmond Healy, Boredom, Self and Culture (1984); Orrin Klapp, Overload and
Boredom (1986); and Patricia Spacks, Boredom (1995).
90 Volume XII, No. 1, 1999 Ian Irvine
sionals, e.g., saturnine melancholy, spleen, fits of the mothers, and
The English Malady.
Due largely to the immense sociocultural changes that struck
Europe in the nineteenth century the problem of chronic ennui
(sometimes termed the spleen, hypp, languer, nerves and disen-
chantment) inevitably became a major theme (if not obsession) for
romantic and realist poets and thinkers. By the late nineteenth cen-
tury it became tangled up with the concept of degeneration and
also with the fin de sicle phenomenon. By that stage it signified a
particular kind of subjective suffering brought about by prolonged
exposure to certain types of social institutions and sociocultural
stresses. In short chronic ennui was associated with the costs to the
subject of urbanisation, bureaucratisation and the industrial revo-
lution. In a sense, then, the concept was used to illustrate the dark
side of modernity. The decadents and later modernist poets, writ-
ers, artists, culture critics and philosophers made use of it in dis-
cussing alienation, reification, absurdity, aboulie, anomie, desac
ralisation, angst, bad faith, neurosis, character armouring and so on. As
said, this essay will consider the contributions of the Early Chris-
tian Fathers to modern conceptions of chronic boredom, with par-
ticular attention to the problem of the ennui cycle.
Some Modern Descriptions of the Ennui Cycle
From the beginning of the eighteenth century the French idea of
chronic ennui signified a particular kind of subjective suffering.
At the deepest level the idea signified a cycle of subjective discon-
tent, a cycle thatat least at the level of symptomsprogressed in-
variably through three distinct phases. The first stage was one of
anxious boredom, of nameless objectless anxiety, which was accom-
panied by fantasies of release from that anxiety. This mood, in due
course, gave way to a second stage characterised by bursts of fran-
tic activity designed to defeat or flee from the inner feelings of dis-
content characteristic of the previous stage. This activity had as its
goal the denial of the previous feelings by immersion in various
more or less repetitive (sometimes absurd) habits. This flurry of ac-
tivity gave way to a third stage of psychospiritual numbness
which allowed a person to feel temporarily free from the anxieties
and impulsive acting out typical of the previous periods. We may
see this third stage as a state of non-being similar to that experi-
Chronic ennui
an obsession
of romantic
and realist
writers.
HUMANITAS 91 Acedia, Tristitia and Sloth
enced by the heroin or smack addict, the sex addict, the gambler,
the food addict, or the drugged patient in a psychiatric ward.
2
This cycle need not be particularly spectacular. The ritualistic
activities of the second stage, for example, may revolve around
hundreds of routine actions, activities, sayings (rationalisations),
and thoughts which in combination act to keep the subject funda-
mentally disconnected from more wholesome experiences of selfhood.
We may list the various specific symptoms attached to the ennui
cycle. Although such symptoms are experienced differently by dif-
ferent peoplei.e., according to gender, race, class, age, and so
forththe core description of the malaise nevertheless seems to re-
veal a certain degree of consistency across social positionings and,
as we shall see with the writings of the Desert Fathers, across time.
The core symptoms are:
1. States/feelings of subjective worthlessness and meaninglessness.
2. Feelings/intimations that the subject is missing out on life.
The feeling also that time is a burden and that one is old before
ones time.
3. States of being periodically possessed by certain malign im-
pulses/forces over which one has little or no effective control.
4. Feelings that the subject is estranged from/divided within/
dispossessed of his/her healthy selfthat is, a feeling that the
way one acts or experiences oneself in the world seems to be
merely an act, or worse, an act that is destructive in that it leads to a
narrowing of life possibilities.
5. Feelings of revulsion toward, or obsessive fascination with,
ones own body and bodily functions or with the bodies and bodily
functions of others. (Various social and cultural commentators on
modernism, e.g., Ihab Hassan, have described a particular state of
ambivalence toward the realm of the feminine, the female body
and the specifically female biological functions.)
6. Impulses to act violently or maliciously towards others, to-
wards ones self or towards the world in general. These may be ex-
Consistent
symptoms.
2
Such comparisons are more than coincidental. The discovery of the endog-
enous opiates in the mid 1970s highlighted the fact that many people in having
recourse to various substances and activities do so in order to self-inject them-
selves with various internally manufactured opiates. It is now known that a large
proportion of the human psychobiological system is geared to pain manage-
mentphysical and psychological. In due course this third stage returned the per-
son to the suffering of the first stage.
92 Volume XII, No. 1, 1999 Ian Irvine
treme or pettyindeed, pettiness as manifested in moods of jeal-
ousy, envy, backbiting, greed, etc., are features of the ennui cycle
and are connected to the nineteenth-century critique of bourgeois
culture in general.
7. A sense that objects out there in the world resonate in the
consciousness of subjects as though they are malign and have spe-
cial powers over human moods, desires, and impulses, and over a
subjects fate or destiny.
8. The loss of an animated, enchanted state of identification with
the world/cosmos/nature, with others in society, and with ones
own needs and desires. Many nineteenth-century poets and think-
ers described this stage as the loss of vision or as the loss of the
communal religious experience.
9. Physical feelingslong-lasting in natureof being burdened,
weighed down, exhausted, by the normal activities/interactions of
everyday existence.
Where persons blame others for this state of being or give them-
selves wholly over to flight from self, writers as diverse as
Kierkegaard, Sartre, Schopenhauer, Camus, and George Steiner
have spoken of normative, active, or sometimes bourgeois en-
nui. Those who are to some extent aware of their malaise are often
deemed to be afflicted with creative boredom/ennui or spiritual
ennui. Since the nineteenth century this form of lennui morbide has
been characterised by an additional symptom:
10. The feeling or intuition that society and its institutions are in
some way connected to, or nurturant of, the particular experience
of ennui suffering felt by a given subjectthat perhaps the norms
of society are in some way generative of the malady. The artists
and theorists who have expressed this intuition link the phenom-
enon of subjective ennui to the great economic, technological, so-
cial, political and religious changes that shook Europe in the early
modern period, e.g., secularisation, urbanisation, industrialisation,
the rise of the bourgeoisie, bureaucratisation, the political revolu-
tions of the period, the scientific revolution, etc. From George
Cheyne (The English Malady, 1733) onwards, symptoms associated
with subjective ennui have been linked to various kinds of socio-
cultural phenomena.
3
3
Reinhard Kuhn (1976) in following this line suggests that ennui must be seen
as the major subjective psychospiritual malady that affected individuals in the
early phases of modernity.
HUMANITAS 93 Acedia, Tristitia and Sloth
The connections of ennui with many other post-Enlightenment
(usually secular) concepts describing subjective disintegration,
melancholia and psychic torment are many. It is no understatement
to suggest that variations on this relatively simple subjective cycle
of consciousness were at the core of many of the great nineteenth-
and early twentieth-century critiques of modernity. In this sense
ennui in conjunction with other words has long had the potential
to launch a full-scale critique of Western civilisation. The perils fac-
ing the subject raised on modernity may equally be the perils of the
collective. George Steiner, for example, speaks of The Great Ennui
as a defining characteristic of post-traditional Western society in
general. He sees it as a central motivating force behind the many
calamities of the twentieth century, notably two world wars, the
ecological crisis, the technocratic tendencies of modern social struc-
tures, anti-Semitism and other forms of minority scapegoating,
and, finally, the advent of the atomic age.
Acedia: Forerunner to Chronic Ennui
Judging by the dearth of primary sources the problem of chronic
ennui (then termed taedium vitae) was not a major issue for classical
writers and poets; other themes far and away predominated.
Among the Ancient Greeks the problem was virtually unheard of
and it is only in the early decades and centuries of the first millen-
nium that the problem is mentioned with any degree of alarm
among Roman intellectuals. Likewise, what is reported is nothing
like the mood of chronic ennui as described by those who would
follow.
4
It was only in the late Roman period that the malaise of
chronic ennui began to assert a major and continuous pull on the
imaginations of the literatethanks mainly to the writings of the
Desert Fathers of Christendom.
5
Whilst the Desert Fathers were developing specifically Chris-
tian perspectives on humanitys psychospiritual relationship to
God, self, society and the cosmos, they were also writing about a
new way of looking at psychospiritual suffering. Their writings
4
See Kuhn (1976, 36 and 39) and Healy (1984, 16).
5
In particular the following figures and texts are seminal: Evagrius of Pontuss
(b. 345) Of the Eight Capital Sins, St. John Chrysosthomoss Exhortations to Stagirius,
Niluss Treatise on the Eight Evil Spirits, and Johanis Cassians The Foundations of
Coenobitic Life and the Eight Capital Sins and Collationes (or Conversations).
Great
Ennui
characteristic
of post-
traditional
society.
94 Volume XII, No. 1, 1999 Ian Irvine
formed the foundations of Christianitys understanding of chronic
ennui, foundations which stayed firm for almost one thousand
years.
6
Whether Christianity itself was the cause of the malady or
whether it merely provided the most thorough diagnosis of chronic
ennui for the age is open to debate,
7
but what is certain is that dur-
ing the fourth century A.D. the classical conceptions of taedium vitae
underwent certain crucial developments. The horror loci and the
various vices of diversion that the Romans had associated with
these two states of being were incorporated into a fundamentally
Christian view of the soul-affirming and soul-destroying passions.
The developments led many people to invent new terms to de-
scribe what they and others were feeling. In this sense, various
modern commentators have noted that modern discussions of
chronic ennui owe much to earlier religious discussions of the
temptation of acedia.
8
6
Bloomfields The Seven Deadly Sins (1952) is still one of the best discussions of
the moral system behind medieval Christianity. The best overview of chronic
ennuis kindred term acedia as it figured in theological and religious texts during
the medieval period can be found in Wenzels The Sin of Sloth: Acedia in Medieval
Thought and Literature (1967). For in-depth discussion of the actual relationship be-
tween acedia and modern forms of ennui see Kuhn (1976, Ch. 3). Kuhn, like many
commentators, sees the concept of acedia as a medieval subspecies of chronic en-
nui. In the same context see Healys comments on acedia: With the development of
Christianity into a religion of the people at large, the vice (of acedia) went through
immense complexities of definition and attribution as it changed from being an
exclusively eremitic affliction, an occupational hazard as it were, into a weakness
capable of besetting any Christian (1984, 17).
7
Of those who have dealt with the historical questions raised by chronic ennui
in general, and normative ennui in particular, most have tended to ignore the ear-
liest outbreaks of the malady and have instead concentrated on the historical and
social forces that contributed to the great epidemic of chronic ennui that struck
Europe during the onset of modernity. Only a few writers, in particular Kuhn
(1976, 41-42), have approached the important question of just why chronic ennuis
ancestor malady acedia took such a grip on the early Christian imagination. Kuhn
cites as reasons the rigorous spiritual lives experienced by the Desert Fathers, the
fact that states of normality seemed rather boring in comparison to the mystical
heights to which the monks attempted to soar, and the actual arid surroundings in
which the monks lived. Such reasoning does not account for the fact that acedia
became a base forin Kuhns wordsthe secularisation and universalisation of
the ennui malaise in the later medieval period. Nor does it solve for us the ques-
tion of whether Christianity as a cultural phenomenon could be blamed for the
later explosion of the malady or whether we should look elsewhere for the causes,
e.g., to economic and social factors or to other cultural factors.
8
Flaubert, Kierkegaard, Baudelaire, Racine, Balzac, Sainte-Beuve, Maurice
Barrs, Marcelle Tinayre and Paul Bourget have all written on or dramatised the
HUMANITAS 95 Acedia, Tristitia and Sloth
Of the many terms used at that time to describe states of con-
sciousness similar to chronic ennuisome of the most well known
being tristitia, siccitas, desidia and pigritia (sloth)the word acedia
came to predominate.
9
It now seems likely that some of the Desert
Fathers associated acedia with the dreaded noonday demon of
Psalm 90:6.
10
Indeed the hour of noon seems to have been a particu-
larly dangerous time for the solitary monks since, when the noon-
tide demon arrived, he often brought with him a whole host of ad-
ditional temptations (viewed as combinations of demons and evil
thoughts, ) which could assuage the monks feelings of
chronic boredom and make him abandon the coenobitic life for-
ever.
11
The concept of acedia thus denoted both a movement of the
soul and a specific evil spirit. In this sense it must be understood
in relation to dualistic conceptions of humanitys place in the cos-
mos current in the late Roman period. It is now known that the
Desert Fathers drew on dualistic tendencies inherent in Iranian,
Hellenistic, Stoic, Gnostic and Judaic worldviews to formulate the
so-called demonological view of the capital sins or temptations.
The demonological system held that human actions in the world
were influenced by both good and bad angels or spirits. The bad
spirits were believed to be under the control of Satan and the good
were said to be under Gods control. The bad spirits skewed the in-
nate passions (the ) in non-life-affirming directions. They did
connection between acedia and forms of chronic ennui. Kuhn (1976, 42 and 55) dis-
cusses the many post-Enlightenment writers who had pointed to the connection.
Healy (1984, 16-18) also speaks of the historical dimensions to this connection. See
also Clives comments (1965, 359). He says chronic ennui is the acedia of the twen-
tieth centurythe experience of being condemned to freedom in a world seem-
ingly devoid of objective values.
9
See Appendix One Etymology of Acedia, Ennui, Spleen and Boredom, for a
discussion of the point where acedia took on cultural meanings similar to that of
the modern day term chronic ennui.
10
See for example Cassians comments (ed. Waddell, 1974, 229) in De Institutis
Coenobiorum (Foundations of Coenobitic Life), 425 A.D.:
Our sixth contending is with that which the Greeks call, and which we
may describe as tedium or perturbation of heart. . . . [S]ome of the Fathers
declare it to be the Demon of Noontide which is spoken of in the xcth Psalm.
11
Caillois (1937, 54-83 and 143-86) relates the Demon of Noontide to les dmons
de midi, i.e. various classical spirits (mainly female) of mischief and temptation
who made their presence felt around middaye.g., sirens, nymphs, harpies,
nereids, etc.
96 Volume XII, No. 1, 1999 Ian Irvine
this by inciting evil thoughts or passions (). Evil thoughts,
according to Evagrius,
12
could become attached in consciousness to
remembered or desired objects which thus became invested with
destructive emotional energy, e.g., gold could become attached to a
greedy state of mind. Such evil thoughts may eventually gain con-
trol of the rational mind at which point non-life-affirming deeds
might result. Every capital sin, temptation, or evil thought was at-
tached to a specific demon or evil spirit. The Desert Fathers sought
peace () from the incessant war between sin and virtue by
trying to make the passions subservient to the rational intellect.
This state was known technically as , which meant to be at
one with God. To many of the Desert Fathers acedia was one of the
worst temptations (demons) because it tried to make the monk give
up the religious life completely. It was thus one of the major
hurdles to controlling the passions and thus to the monks salvation
and desired union with God.
Of the many descriptions of coenobitic acedia
13
perhaps the best
summary of its early medieval characteristics is to be found in
Cassians De Institutis Coenobiorum (Foundations of Coenobitic Life)
where acedia figures as the sixth of the eight major temptations.
14
In
this work the older classical descriptions of taedium vitae, melan-
choly and black gall are clearly reworked to fit into a specifically
Christian framework. Various symptoms are discussed, many of
which replicate classical symptoms of chronic ennui, e.g., horror
loci, inexplicable sadness, addiction to objects (luxuria) and a cer-
tain desire to do anything rather than confront the negative emo-
tional forces (temptations) that were trying to possess ones being:
Our sixth contending is with that which the Greeks call a-kedia
(from a-, not; kedos, care) and which we may describe as tedium
or perturbation of heart. It is akin to dejection [tristitia], and espe-
cially felt by wandering monks and solitaries, a persistent and ob-
noxious enemy to such as dwell in the desert, disturbing monks
12
Evagrius, Texts on Discrimination in Respect of Passions and Thoughts
(1983, 38-52).
13
See the Checklist of Authors for comments on the theme of acedia/ennui as it
relates to the works of Nilus, St. John Chrysosthomos, St. Jerome and Evagrius of
Pontius.
14
For comments on the role of acedia as the Demon of Noontide in The Foun-
dations of Coenobitic Life and The Eight Capital Sins see Wenzel (1967, Chapters 1
and 2). See also Rivers (1955, 293) and Revers (1949), esp. Chapter 1 Die Acedia bei
Johannes Cassianus.
Acedia, or
sloth, among
the worst
temptations.
HUMANITAS 97 Acedia, Tristitia and Sloth
especially about midday, like a fever mounting at a regular time,
and bringing its highest tide of inflammation at definite accus-
tomed hours to the sick soul . . . .
When this besieges the unhappy mind, it begets aversion from
the place, boredom with ones cell, and scorn and contempt for
ones brethren, whether they be dwelling with one or some way
off, as careless and unspiritually minded persons. Also, towards
any work that may be done within the enclosure of our own lair,
we become listless and inert. It will not suffer us to stay in our cell,
or to attend to our reading: we lament that in all this while, living
in the same spot, we have made no progress, we sigh and complain
that bereft of sympathetic fellowship we have no spiritual fruit;
and bewail ourselves as empty of all spiritual profit . . . and we that
could guide others . . . have edified no man, enriched no man with
our precept and example. We praise other and far distant monas-
teries, describing them as more helpful to ones progress, more
congenial to ones souls health . . . . Finally we conclude that there
is no health for us so long as we stay in this place, short of aban-
doning the cell wherein to tarry further will be only to perish with
it, and betaking ourselves elsewhere as quickly as possible.
Towards eleven oclock or midday, it induces such lassitude of
body and craving for food as one might feel after . . . hard toil. Fi-
nally one gazes anxiously here and there, and sighs that no brother
of any description is to be seen approaching: one is for ever in and
out of ones cell, gazing at the sun as though it were tarrying to its
setting: ones mind is in an irrational confusion . . . one is slothful
and vacant in every spiritual activity, and no remedy, it seems, can
be found for this state of siege than a visit from some brother, or
the solace of sleep. Finally our malady suggests that in common
courtesy one should salute the brethren, and visit the sick, near and
far. It dictates such offices of duty and piety as to seek out this rela-
tive or that . . . far better to bestow ones pious labour upon these
than sit without benefit, or profit in ones cell.
15
This demon is said to work hand in hand with the fifth demon
Dejection, which also has much in common, at the symptom
level, with various forms of malevolent boredom. We also note
similarities between the state described and modern forms of de-
pression.
The modern secular mind might hastily jump to the conclusion
that the monks were bored for good reason and that the desire to
flee their cells was merely a natural response to the absurdities of
an ascetic lifestyle. Such a conclusion does not account for the fact
that these states of consciousness were, in a sense, courted by the
15
Cassian (ed. Waddell, 1946, 229-231).
98 Volume XII, No. 1, 1999 Ian Irvine
monks. The demons had to be brought out of hiding, so as to speak,
before one could truly experience (spiritual oneness with
God by control of the passions by the rational mind). The monks
very probably chose such inhospitable surroundings and arduous
lifestyle as means to bring on a state of spiritual catharsis. They
perhaps sought to improve themselves by a series of confrontations
with aspects of their lives which normal living kept submerged. In
this sense the goals of their practices could be seen (with certain
reservations) as creative and thus in opposition to normative forms
of ennui. The very fact that the fathers spent so much time and en-
ergy trying to sort out the destructive passions from the angelic
ones might suggest that acute forms of normative ennui existed
outside religious circles and that perhaps some people opted for
the ascetic life as a means of overcoming such addictive and ulti-
mately destructive states of being.
Cassians other work, Collationes, or Conversations (425 A.D.),
also deals with acedia as experienced by the Desert Fathers. Particu-
larly relevant is the interview with Father Daniel, one of the Desert
Fathers. What emerges from the conversation is the idea that
chronic boredom is something through which one passes in order
to experience new heights of spiritual oneness with God. Some-
thing like the creative, solitary ennui of later artists, poets and
writers, and the spiritual ennui of shamans, priests/priestesses,
and mystics of many traditions seems to be the goal. Cassian has
one of the monks relate the following experience:
We feel overwhelmed, crushed by dejection [tristitia] for which we
can find no motif. The very source of mystic experiences is dried
up . . . the train of thought becomes lost, inconstant and bewildered
. . . . We complain, we try to remind our spirit of its original goals.
But in vain. Sterility of the soul! And neither the longing for
Heaven nor the fear of Hell are capable of shaking our lethargy.
16
Pope Gregory I (The Great) wrote his Morals on the Book of Job
some 150 years after Cassians Foundations and Collationes. In the
process, he added the final touches to the medieval idea of acedia.
He reduced the number of capital sins from eight to seven, merging
tristitia and acedia into one sin. He also helped universalise the
ideas of the Desert Fathers since he wrote for a larger audience. As
a result, all Christendom came to believe that the Capital Sins were
central to the Christian moral system. One of those sins was the
16
Johanis Cassian, Collationes [or Conversations] (425A.D.) [IV, 2].
Need to
confront
ones
demons.
HUMANITAS 99 Acedia, Tristitia and Sloth
temptation of acedia which would later take the title of sloth.
17
In
the process of its universalisation the solitary, sometimes excruciat-
ing and cathartic, confrontation between the self and the Demon of
Noontide gradually lost its emphasis as a mode of attaining salva-
tion. Despite centuries of pronounced theological debate there were
few alterations to the concept of acedia from this period on.
18
The Efficacy of Demonological Approaches to Acedia
In surveying the numerous early medieval texts concerned with
acedia it seems clear that it was an early form of morbid ennui. On
this I agree with Kuhns conclusions.
19
Many of the symptoms de-
scribed as indicative of acedia (e.g., horror loci; tedium vitae; chronic
depression; unwarranted sadness; crippling lethargy; lack of joy;
lack of at-peaceness with the universe; addiction to activities, ob-
jects, or states of mind which give no true fulfilment; the constant
desire to flee from ascending states of deep anxiety by resort to
such addictions; and, lack of mystic vision or imagination
20
) cer-
tainly carried over into later descriptions of the various forms of
chronic boredom.
The spiritual techniques (fasting, prayer and solitude) by which
the demon of acedia was made manifest, and the internal conflicts
which the Church Fathers experienced and described in their
works, seem to have much in common with shamanic and religious
practices endemic to many other world traditions. (Traditional sha-
mans, for instance, routinely confronted various demons, devils,
and spirits of discord and decay.
21
) In more recent times many art-
17
See Kuhn (1976, 54-55) for comments regarding the contribution of Gregory
The Great and his work Morals On the Book of Job to medieval and modern concep-
tions of acedia and chronic ennui.
18
Readers who wish to take up all aspects of the theological debate over acedia
as manifested in Scholasticism and later medieval monasticism are directed to
Wenzel (1967, esp. Chapter 3).
19
Kuhn (1976, 53-64) makes a strong case for the similarities between acedia
and modern forms of chronic ennui.
20
Though chronic ennui is rarely these days associated with specifically Chris-
tian perceptions of the absence of joy or inspiration, the idea that human beings
have lost touch with spiritual powers, however vaguely imagined, remains.
21
Roccatagliata (1986, 4) argues that the exorcism of demons by resort to soli-
tude, fasting, drugs, intense prayer chanting/singing, and dance has long been
central to demonological approaches to mental illness. He says that at the time
the church fathers were writing, mythological, animistic, biological and humoral
approaches to disturbances of the soul were more or less in decline in favour
100 Volume XII, No. 1, 1999 Ian Irvine
ists and poets have described their sufferings from chronic ennui in
terms of exorcistic, cathartic and mystical imagery similar to that
used by the Desert Fathers. One usually confronts such destructive
psychospiritual forces for the purpose of purifying the self and
thus of protecting the community from the harms that could result
from the passions turned noxious. One faces the abyss, pursues the
via negativa, in order to become spiritually and emotionally whole.
22
The states of chronic ennui associated with such a confrontation are
far removed from the forms of the malaise that currently afflict
Western civilisationwhat I have labeled normative ennui. So
prevalent is the malady of normative ennui in the West today that
people who see value in contemplation, in spiritual disciplines de-
signed to improve themselves emotionally, are derided and even
stigmatised as lazy and non-productive.
It is quite possible that the early Church Fathers were confront-
ing a malaise nurtured by the great urban centres of the age. They
were, perhaps, taking on a disease nurtured by empireby
urbanisation and bureaucratisation. Such a reading would suggest
that they were taking on powers that would one day station them-
selves at the very centre of Western civilisation. If so, the show-
down between the Demon of Noontide and the monks of the new
religion in the arid wastelands of the African deserts is one of the
most neglected psychospiritual events of Western history.
of the Christian demonological system. According to Roccatagliata (p. 14), the
Church Fathers and the church Apologists unified animistic and sacred outlooks,
as well as the mystical ideologies led by Orpheus, Pythagorus, and the philoso-
phies of Plato and the Stoics in order to create their new approach. It is thus likely
that some of the Church Fathers saw themselves as what we would term thera-
pists in relation to both the major psychological disturbances of the age and the
more existential disturbances of the soul experienced by normal people. Both
types of unease merge in the concept of acedia, both had a spiritual solution: exor-
cism of the evil spirits in the name of the Christian deity. Such a reading of the
struggles of the Desert Fathers would suggest that their ennui was more similar to
what I have called creative ennui than to the other major ennui categories, i.e.,
dysfunctional or normative ennui.
22
Kuhn (1976, 45) also points to the cathartic element in the practices of the
early Church Fathers. In particular, he speaks of the relationship between acedia
and the via negativa: . . . acedia is almost a precondition for a life of eternal bliss . . .
it is the noche oscura del alma that lay between Saint John of the Cross and divine
grace. . . . The via negativa that passes through acedia is a road fraught with hazards
and with promises. It represents a dangerous proving ground through which the
soul can purify itself and sometimes it serves as a prelude to the joys and beatitude
of ecstasy.
HUMANITAS 101 Acedia, Tristitia and Sloth
We are led to perhaps the most important question: did medi-
eval Christianity nurture or counteract acedia? The question is im-
portant for any modern assessment of chronic ennui, especially
since George Steiner has recently suggested that this secular ver-
sion of acedia is still, essentially, a religious problem.
23
My own position on these early Christian commentaries con-
cerning the causes and cures for the problem is ambivalent. It could
be argued that in the shift from the often solitary confrontation
with acedia in the inhospitable deserts of Northern Africa to the
universalised confrontation with it characteristic of the later medi-
eval period (diagnosed for all Christians under the title of sloth)
there was lost that element of catharsis which has been encouraged
by many traditional peoples to treat states of psychospiritual disin-
tegration. In my opinion, the switch represented the end of serious
attempts by mainstream, institutional Christianity to tackle the en-
nui/acedia malaise. From about 1200 on the mystics, poets, and art-
ists of the West took up the struggle instead.
From an ethical perspective the confrontations with ennui expe-
rienced by the early Church Fathers were conditioned by a specific
kind of religious belief system, a system that often confused nox-
ious passions with perfectly healthy ones and which privileged
masculine forms of the rational intellect over the body (particularly
the functions of the female body). In this sense some of the acedia
experienced by the monks must be attributed to their attempts to
live basically passionless lives, i.e., to reify their experience of the
lifeworld and live instead in the world of reason and the spirit.
Consequently, they may have treated one form of chronic ennui
(normative ennui) with a religious form of the same malaise. This
may be part of the reason that Christianity has been essentially un-
able to defeat the joylessness associated with the various forms of
the ailment. It is a tendency, I believe, peculiar to the moral systems
developed by the monotheistic religions.
Yet the monks were fine psychologists, and it is clear that on
many occasions they saw acedia and the other capital temptations
as distortions of otherwise life-affirming passions. If there is one es-
sential lesson to be learnt from their writings it is that we should
respect the power and subtlety of the malaise they confronted in
23
See my analysis of In Bluebeards Castle in my Ph.D. thesis entitled Uncomfort-
ably Numb: The Emergence of the Normative Ennui Cycle (1998, chapter 8).
102 Volume XII, No. 1, 1999 Ian Irvine
their own beings. The Demon of Noontide was no pushover: it
could erode the will, afflict the body and darken a persons emo-
tional terrain with depression, madness and thoughts of suicide. It
could also offer escape from cathartic confrontation with self by in-
sinuating into consciousness all manner of inauthentic desires,
pseudo-needs, and fantasies of relief which, though serving to
ward off the worst excesses of acedia, could ultimately lead only to
spiritual ruin. In this sense the courage of the Desert Fathers as
they attempted to name and confront this subtle and destructive
psychospiritual entity surely deserves our admiration if not our
awe. For this reason alone the writings of the Desert Fathers must
surely contribute something to our attempts to understand modern
forms of chronic ennui. If Rome can be seen as the origin of the con-
cept of normative ennui, then the deserts of northern Africa may
be seen as the site of the first major creative and spiritual response
to that malaise.
Postscript: Postmodernist Ennui
Early Christian descriptions of acedia and related vices did not
view society as the cause of the subjective suffering described.
This is in sharp contrast to most modern descriptions of acedias
progeny terms, e.g., chronic ennui, anomie, and alienation. Roman-
tic, modernist, and postmodern uses of these words invariably en-
compass the idea that something is wrong with the link between
the self and the other of society. In this sense such concepts often
represent an implicit critique of modernity. The depression, languer,
and melancholy that characterised nineteenth-century ennui con-
tradicted the great Enlightenment bourgeois ideals of progress,
competition, scientific and technological advancement, and social
evolution in general: ennui played gollum to the sturdy hobbit of
liberalism.
Understanding the enormous implications of our current dis-
trust of the social apparatus may allow us to better define and illus-
trate the immensity of the new crisis of the subject currently afflict-
ing Western societies. In this new phase chronic ennui has become
associated with schizophrenic, depressive, narcissistic and psycho-
pathic symptoms and with what Bouchez (1973) terms the de-
realisation of subjective life characteristic of the late twentieth cen-
tury.
HUMANITAS 103 Acedia, Tristitia and Sloth
How relevant then are terms like taedium, vitae, acedia, tristitia,
siccitas, saturnine melancholy, The English Malady, lennui
morbide, etc., to discussions of the postmodern maladies of the sub-
ject? I would argue that chronic ennui is more virulent than ever
in the postmodernist phase of our society (though different in char-
acter from earlier outbreaks). It can be argued that postmodernist
ennui represents a specific disintegrative response to the particular
social formations characteristic of advanced capitalism and ad-
vanced statism in general.
It is my argument that the fragmentation of the subject occa-
sioned by the new phase of modernity (sometimes called high mo-
dernity or postindustrialism) lies on a continuum with, but is
qualitatively different from, earlier states of subjective suffering.
The web of society and culture that is supposed to help sustain
peoples material and psychospiritual needs is perhaps more toxic
than ever to the real needs of subjects. In this new phase the norms
of the social web bespeak an advanced state of normative schizo-
phrenia and psychopathology. If we wish to find a way out of the
soul-destroying routines of the postmodern ennui cycle with its
consumeristic addictions (see Perecs Things), its narcissism and
love of empty spectacle, its insane hunger for more and more ob-
jects to fill up the void of a life without meaning, I would suggest
that we reassess the long tradition of writings on the maladies of
the subject. We might ask ourselves where exactly the Desert Fa-
thers went wrong, and just as importantly, where they were on the
right track. Like George Steiner in his work on the Great Ennui in
In Bluebeards Castle (1971), we might admit that our current mala-
dies of the self (and their social manifestations) are deeply related
to the more general problems of the history of human spirituality. If
this is the case, and I believe it is, then the battle between the Desert
Fathers and the Demon of Noontide is of the utmost significance
for modern discussions of the history of subjectivity.
Destructive
norms.